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Blogger Carl Cheo, who maintains a website providing numbered lists of tips for maximizing online productivity, has pulled together an easy-to-follow graphic answering the newbie question "What programming language should I learn first?" (pdf here). Cheo chose nine commercially viable languages as possible destinations as the viewer navigates the flow chart. Further down the page, there are tabs with annotated links to educational resources for each language. So what's in it for Soylentils, most of whom I'm guessing were programming newbies in the previous millenium? Well, maybe you have nephews or nieces who chose the wrong major in college. Besides, the graphic is amusing and clever, though probably not the last word on the subject.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday January 25 2015, @11:44AM
You don't explain every detail on the first encounter. Indeed, the worst courses are those who try to explain everything the first time you encounter it. No matter what language, it almost certainly means that you get swamped with details which you don't need to care about yet.
When taught correctly, the cout interface is the simpler one. You just have to explain that cout means "output", things you want to output are added with << foo, and endl means "end of line, show now".
Just as at this point you'll not teach that standard output is just a special case of a file, with certain restrictions like that you cannot seek, you'll also not teach at this point that cout is a class, that << is an overloaded operator, or that endl is actually a function. All the details you'll explain when you get there (for example, wne it comes to output your own types), not earlier.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.